How to Approach Speaking and Listening through Drama

Summary of How to Approach Speaking and Listening through Drama?

23 April 2020,

(Micro Teaching) Summary Chapter 1
By Abidah Amaliah (171230073) TBI 6C

In teaching English, many aspects that must be considered by a teacher, one of them is a learning strategy. This is possible to assist students in understanding the material presented. Many strategies that can be used by teachers when they want to teach Speaking and Listening to students, one of them is using drama.

1.      How to Begin with Teacher in Role

a.     Why use teacher in role?

Teacher have to give the explanation or knowledge interactively and have to understand easily. So, one of the technique is as a role of the text. For example, the teacher begin to role with explain about drama. 

b.    Teacher as Storyteller

Teacher must be a storyteller to explain the text of drama clearly. It will helps students imagine and understand how the story contained in the text. Then, students also must be involve themselves to role a play agree with the text. Whether, the student ask some question base on teacher explanation.

c.     Preparation for the Role

Begin by asking the class out of role what they want to ask the child and the order of those questions. This not only provides the teacher with some security in knowing what is going to be asked, at least initially, but also allows some minutes to refine the planning, so that the teacher can be specific in answering their questions.

d.   Teaching from within. Moving in and out of role – managing the drama and reflecting on it.

We are describing using role as ‘teaching from within’ because the teacher enters the drama world, but it is very important to step out of the fiction often and not let it run away with itself. When using TiR, the teacher is operating as a manager as well as participant and must spend as much time stopping the drama and moving out of role (OoR) to reflect on what is happening and give the pupils a chance to think through what they know and what they want to do. This OoR working is as important as the role itself. It manages the role and therefore the drama; it manages the risk, establishes where the class is and helps pupils believe in the drama. It provides time and space for the teacher to assess and re-assess the learning possibilities.

e.      The requirements of working in role

The teacher, working in this way, is an important stimulus for the learning. It is not necessary to use role throughout the piece of work. It can be used judiciously to focus work at strategic points or to challenge particular aspects of the children’s perceptions whilst other techniques and conventions are used to support the work and develop it.

f.       Disturbing the class productively

The teacher’s function is to provide challenge and stimulus, to give problems and issues for the class to have to deal with. The drama is developed through a set of activities that build the class role, which is usually a corporate role. We have to help them into the drama, making them comfortable, and then disturb that comfort productively. The fact that, as in any good play, the class discover things as they go along provides the possibility of productive tension.

g.      Responding to your class

The art of authentic dialogue – needing to listen – two-way Responses. The class working as a community is the key to the use of drama as a teaching method. This is another reason that the class have more ownership.

h.    The teacher–taught relationship

In all teaching situations there exists a power relationship between the learners and the teacher. The learners are bound together as a group merely by being the learners and, of course, as there are more of them than there are of you, they hold the power.

             2. How to Begin Planning Drama

a.      How to planning drama

In planning a drama we have to write the main frame, the scenario, in a way that indicates the relationship of the component parts and how the interactions provide tension and potential. For example, the frame of ‘The Governor’s Child.

b.    The ingredients of planning

Creating a drama is very much like cooking. It is easy to serve up a fast food meal, which has very little quality and goodness, but it is a more detailed, careful and thorough process to create a quality meal from scratch with good ingredients. Our ingredients include the following.

c.     Learning objectives

Learning is often focused through a key problem or issue for the children to tackle (Dorothy Heathcote’s ‘man in a mess’). This helps hand responsibility for learning to the pupils themselves. The learning can be in any of five areas: (language development, (spiritual,social,moral,cultural,personal), content, art form drama, thinking skills).

d.     Strong material

We need a stimulus to learning, to focus the exploration. This my be a piece of writing with key learning points, that are usually unresolved by the writer of the original material.

e.       Roles for the pupils

The class need to be framed up as a community, where the class work together supporting each other and working for the same aims. This builds their ability to communicate with and understand each other, the best basis for all learning.

f.       Tension points – risks – theatre moments

Tension provides the momentum that pushes the class, demands a response, engages them. It involves taking calculated risks; for example in a recent version of a drama based on ‘Snow White’ the class, who were in role as people helping the dwarves at the mine, returned to the house to find Snow White, who appears to be dead. This is a very demanding moment, but one that the children, after initial hesitation, tackled with great commitment. 

g.     Building context and belief

That consolidation of the context strengthened the integrity of the drama and helped structure it, as you will see from the full plan. This is done in a variety of ways. Use of TiR can interest and build belief. The right choice of pupil roles helps that, especially if meaningful activity can be given to them to establish the roles, or the situation and place is properly realised and created for the imagination, as indicated in the previous paragraph.

h.  Decision-making – key developments in the drama which provide the class with challenges.

Many teacher decisions are built into the plan as givens, otherwise there will be no clear direction for the learning. As with many art forms, the constraints of the piece are critical to the quality of the product. What we embed as non-negotiable in the planning of a drama tightens the focus and ensures a concentration on the particularity of the main event. As successful dramas move from the particular to the universal this makes certain the contexts and dilemmas are not nebulous or indistinct.

i.        The drama conventions, strategies and techniques

There are many techniques for structuring the stages of a drama. Variety of activity for the class is important but each chosen technique must fit the moment and do a particular job.

j.      Planning as a collaborative activity

Planning for true learning is a social activity and needs to have more than one mind brought in to develop its full potential. In our team, one member may have the beginning of an idea and sketch that idea out, but usually turns to another member of the team for feedback and a planning discussion.

k.    Road testing the first version

Participants in dramas offer us as the teachers insights into ways of using an established structure. Once we have the beginnings of a drama we need to try ideas out.

l.      Types of drama

There are two main types of this sort of classroom drama that have evolved: ‘living through drama’, where the pupils face the events at a sort of life rate in the here and now, and ‘episodic drama’, or strategy-based drama, where the class are led by the teacher in creating situations and events through specific techniques or strategies and where chronology is more broken.

m.   What about endings to dramas?

The class must always go away feeling they have achieved something. They need to have solved the problem. If a final resolution is possible, for example, as a result of the forum, Max realises he must think of other people, then let them win, but the class must have worked hard for it in putting the case across to him. You, in role as Max, will feel the pressure if they apply it well and can begin to signal that you do see you might be wrong always to think of yourself, that you are listening for the first time.

           3.      How to Generate Quality Speaking and Listening

a.     What is speaking and listening ?

Speaking and listening is the most important communication form that human beings use. Really effective oracy, developmental speaking and listening, will help pupils build their language, their understanding, their ability to handle their own world, making sense of it and who they are in it.

b.      Dialogic teaching

Drama gives the pupils plenty of opportunities to think through speaking and listening. It promotes speech from the pupils because they want to speak, not because they are being asked to speak. Drama sets up more fluid situations with more possibilities. Mistakes can be made and looked at because any particular stage of the drama can be reworked to make it work better for us. In fact the making of mistakes is seen as part of the learning, a major part of helping to negotiate the meaning and to create the drama itself.

c.     What does dialogic teaching demand of the teacher?

Drama certainly demands these as well. One of the key changes that drama brings is a different position for the teacher. When the teacher uses role herself she is able to dialogue in a very different way with the pupils; she leaves teacher talk behind. If the teacher is the young boy, Daedalus, who has taken his father’s secret project design, without his permission, and the pupils are the family servants, then they have important decisions to make about what they do with this knowledge. They will talk to Daedalus in a way that they can never talk to a teacher.

d.      How is listening of high quality taught through drama?

In drama we can get new levels of listening because of the pupils’ interest in the problem-solving of the drama itself. The focus of the problem or dilemma that the pupils face embodies the nature of the language. In order to carry out all of these speaking activities they are, of course, inevitably developing their listening and we see this in all its powerful and active modes, listening that is: open, sensitive, reflective, receptive, supportive, attentive, collective, creative. This is because each pupil has to make sense of what the teacher and the rest of the pupils are gradually building up around them.

           4.      How to Use Drama for Inclusion and Citizenship

a.      What can drama offer in terms of inclusion?

·   Drama offers ‘new opportunities to pupils who may have experienced previous difficulties.

·     Drama takes account of pupils’ varied life experiences and needs by using fictional contexts and roles which enable pupils to explore the underlying issues safely.

·  For some pupils drama may offer experiences that are different to those they experience in the real world, for example taking the role of the outsider or the role of the one in charge.

b.     The concept of drama and keeping pupils safe

It would be simplistic to believe that just because we work within fictional contexts, using fictional roles and events, that the experience for pupils is therefore immediately safe from the negative and destructive emotions of real life experiences. In teaching, whether working inside or outside fiction, we need to be constantly aware of the need to treat pupils in ways that demonstrate respect for persons and awareness of their particular social and emotional circumstances in that learning situation.

c.     Having a voice in society

If we plan for pupils’ ideas to be part of the drama lesson and we are creating a safe environment for this to happen, we are in effect giving them a voice to express their understandings and perspective on the world in which they live.

d.    Having no voice in society

What these pupils think, say and do often bears no relation to each other. They come into the drama lesson wary of saying what they think and reluctant to express a view or make suggestions that may be challenged by the majority or dominant group.

e.     The relationship between inclusion and citizenship

If drama by its very operational values is an inclusive way of working and if the contents of some dramas are in themselves examining the nature of the outsider, then Citizenship and PSHE are an integral part of the drama experience.

f.    How to approach Citizenship and PSHE through drama: practising being part of a society

Drama’s relationship to citizenship works on two levels, as a methodology that demonstrates aspects of citizenship in action and when the content is specifically focused upon issues of citizenship. When we consider that drama can link citizenship with personal and social education, and spiritual, moral, social and cultural education, then we can begin to understand the importance of drama as a teaching method.

g.      Drama as citizenship in action

·   The class work as a whole group, dividing into sub-groups for some tasks, but experiencing their class as a democratic community.

·    Every member of the group may speak and contribute to the development of the drama.

·   All members of the group must respect the other members – their opinions and viewpoints.

·     We stop the drama at any point to consider and discuss what is happening and what it means so that everyone may clarify their understanding and therefore have a greater chance to make a contribution.

·   When group decisions are to be made, debate may happen, but it is the majority view of the group that will be taken.

·    We reflect together on the meanings we are forging and that together we are stronger in that creative act.

h.     A drama for teaching about citizenship

We can see from a summary of the drama that a number of citizenship issues are immediately contextualized and presented to the children. Drama ensures that they have to explore them and get involved in them, to challenge and seek solutions in a number of ways.

           5.      How to Generate Empathy in a Drama

a.     What is empathy?

The word empathy is sprinkled liberally throughout education documentation and literature.

b.     A working definition of empathy

The connection between empathy, learning and drama, for if we can through the acting out of imagined realities generate empathetic behavior in pupils, they can not only learn from each other but also examine and refine their empathetic skills. And all this is taking place within the safety of pretend worlds without the consequences of the real world.

c.       The components of empathy

·         Component One – the cognitive component

·         Component Two – the affective component

d.      Can we plan for generating empathy?

We can generate empathy through structuring roles and creating a drama frame where it is likely to happen. There are three parts to this process: the role of the teacher, the role of the pupils and the frame in which they are placed.

·         The role of the pupils

·         The role of the teacher

           6.      How to Link History and Drama

a.     A problematic alliance

For drama there is a fatal attraction with history as a source for its content. Drama as a medium with which to engage with the past is established in theatre, film, literature, radio and television. In fact one of the Key Elements in the History National Curriculum is the interpretation of history.

b.    Dressing up to go back in time

One popular method of ‘empathizing’ in the teaching of history takes the form of dressing up in costumes from the past. Schools across the country plan days of ‘visiting the past’ by dressing up and sometimes actually going to historic sites in their costumes. Alternatively, schools will suspend the usual timetable and devote lessons and other activities to a particular period in time. Teachers may even be locked into roles from the past (one could almost say trapped in roles from the past), thinking, misguidedly in our view, this will generate ‘empathy’ in the pupils with people from history.

c.     Using drama to make meaning of the past

As a teacher planning a history-related drama this does not mean abandoning facts and reasons. In striving to accommodate the potentially unreconcilable dimensions of fact and fiction, we need to balance imagined realities with authenticated realities. In other words, we need to research our history and bring the fruits of that research to the lesson.

Three elements of historical enquiry:

1)      A concern with facts

2)      A concern with reasons

3)      A concern with meanings

d.     Balancing the tensions – stories and history

Much of drama in education operates from creating fictions and telling stories. Of course this is not necessarily in conflict with history as we can approach individuals’ viewpoints in history as their stories of the past. Essentially history is story; it began as oral history and is a shared story of society.

e.     Setting up a historian’s frame

The drama begins as a history lesson, with the idea of taking on roles in the lesson introduced from the beginning. The pupils’ first role is of high status and expertise:

In the drama you will have several roles, one of them will be historians and at other times you will be the people we are concerned with in this drama – that is, the poor street children of the 1870s in London.

*Let’s start with your role as historians. Before we do, you need to tell me:

What is a historian?

What do historians do?

What skills do they need?

f.     Meetings with teacher in role

It is important to find out what the class will ask you; by doing it this way you can get a sense of what they are interested in and at the same time feel prepared for the initial couple of questions.

g.     Meeting the boys in the photograph

Part of the process of setting this up is the modelling of roles by the teacher before asking pupils to take on this responsibility. They will have seen you taking the work seriously and you need to make clear the demands that will be made upon those who decide to do it.

h.      Setting up the boys

Away from the rest of the class (you might do this at a break time or lunchtime), those who have decided to be the boys meet with you.

i.      Whole class participation – a sculpture of children living on the streets

In this drama each frame takes the class closer to the children who are the subject of our historical investigations. The next task is to engage the whole class as a sculpture of the children living on the streets. The use of still image is important here because it constrains the action and forces the class into a holding moment which, like a painting or a photograph, allows us to examine the detail and what it means for us. The whole class need to consider where they are in the sculpture. If the dying embers of a fire (represented by a chair turned upside down) are the center of the picture, where are they? Questions of status, pecking order and rank are immediately raised and discussed.

j.     Whole class improvisation

We can use the sculpture and thought-tracking work as a starting point for a whole class improvisation or ‘living through’ part of the drama. The class remake the sculpture and this time TiR enters into the work which now takes on a ‘living through’ mode of working. What is important here is the manner in which this is achieved; all the time as teacher you are enabling the participation of the pupils in a way that is non-threatening and accesses them to speak when they feel comfortable to do so. The fear of humiliation by making a mistake or getting it wrong, fears that are sadly part of the culture of too many classrooms, are eroded.

k.    History as a metaphor for now – the global dimension

It is important that we make the connections between issues in history where they remain issues for us over time. The issue of street children is an example of one of these. In Life on the Streets: Children’s Stories the BBC published stories of homeless or underprivileged children from St Petersburg, La Paz and Delhi. Their stories echo the issues that are raised in the history drama – exclusion, poverty and survival.

            7.    How to Begin Using Assessment of Speaking and Listening (and Other English Skills)            through Drama?

a.     What is assessment?

The primary aim of assessment is to provide information about the development and achievement of those involved in the teaching and learning situation. Assessment records evidence related to students' abilities, both actual and potential, and charts their progression.

b.      Drama as a context for speaking and listening

·    Negotiating and co-operating with others in the creation of drama work and the roles within it.

·       Expressing imaginative ideas when contributing to the drama work development.

·     Taking and using effectively the opportunities within the drama that require oral and aural communication.

·    Modifying, selecting and relating language and vocabulary to the changing roles, moods and situations in the drama work.

·    Controlling effectively oral and aural communication particularly in challenging sequences of drama work, e.g. questioning, dilemmas, unfair or emotional situations.

·     Responding with enjoyment and enthusiasm to the exploration of speech, gesture and sound.

·       Contributing effectively to critical evaluation of their own work and that of others.

c.      What is the purpose of the assessment?

To: give feedback to the pupil, report to another teacher, and report to a parent.

d.       Formative assessment – honoring what children can do

In the formative role of assessment we need to be feeding back to the pupils during and after the drama. We might stop a drama and say to everyone, Can you see what Nafisa’s question made the Soldier say? That is very important here. Let’s see what the outcome is. Then we are building esteem and boosting achievement.

e.      How do we collect data more formally?

Assessment in this context is the detailed study of episodes of speaking and listening. We need to describe what we see and teachers need to operate as researchers of the dialogue in their classrooms. Educational research is becoming more encouraging of detailed description of events, particularly when looking at classrooms in the action research method we are advocating.

f.       Other issues to consider

We have to manage the exchanges in a drama so that the naturally dominant voices in the classroom learn to listen and we allow others space to talk. However, there is an unhelpful myth about speaking and listening that speaking is the major partner, with the accompanying vain aim for classroom talk that all must contribute equally.

g.     Capturing the samples of speaking and listening

There is readily available technology that can record work and allow us to consider it at greater length after the event, particularly video recording. This is an approach we have been taking for a long time now; it provides evidence that we use to assess our own performance as teachers working in drama. Again, if teachers are paired to do the assessment, one can handle the camera while the other teaches.

h.    Talk for writing – the wholeness of communication

In a school with a strong policy on speaking and listening there will be major gains in other areas. We can get clear evidence for assessment of the effectiveness of speaking and listening, particularly the latter, from other forms of communication like writing or art work. In addition the writing itself can benefit.